Recyclops

Our goal is to streamline the medical waste disposal process by making it efficient and safe for the environment.

Inspiration

As students interested in pursuing a career in the medical field, we have volunteered and shadowed countless doctors in different hospitals and clinics. Every day, we see medical waste improperly thrown away, and the entire process is inefficient. This has motivated us to work on improving how medical waste is treated so that it works like a well-oiled machine. We plan to implement robots to sort medical waste and create chambers to convert carbon dioxide into natural gas.

What it does

Our project efficiently reduces the toxins that the medical waste disposal removal processes produce and reduces the overall harmfulness of medical waste that has been processed during incineration.

How they built it

One of the main problems we thought about was the toxins released during the incineration process of medical waste. After further research, we found an EPA diagram and research into clean air incinerators that "only" release carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is one of the leading causes of global warming, so we looked into how we can reduce the carbon dioxide released. This led us to wonder how carbon dioxide could be used. After conducting further research on this topic, we discovered that we could convert carbon dioxide into usable energy with the use of zinc and copper oxide and carbonated water. Our other idea involving robots sorting medical waste was inspired by an idea we had using RFID chips. Some medical centers around the world use RFID chips in certain medical products to identify them. This led us to conduct research into the use of robotics and RFID chips to sort the medical waste into appropriate containers to reduce the need to incinerate the materials.

Challenges they ran into

Because we have insufficient knowledge of robotics and sensors we didn't have a physical prototype of a robot that sorts out medical waste based on their identifiers.

Accomplishments they are proud of

This is our first hackathon so we are proud of the ideas we have come up with as well as the effort we put into this project.

What they learned

As a team, we gained insight into the different inefficiencies of the medical waste disposal process and we learned valuable teamwork skills.

What’s next?

Our next step is to develop a prototype of the robot and present it to different medical facilities.

Try it out:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P483TspKVkf98jdgzUBCkwliTIf4DfmU-hH9IVS95ME/edit#slide=id.p

Devpost Link:

https://devpost.com/software/idk-yet-ox7vey